Monthly Archives: January 2014

App Annie reviews 2013’s top mobile app industry findings, ranging from major country moves to social messaging apps evolution to platforms.

2013 was a milestone year for mobile apps and app stores alike, setting the stage for exciting new opportunities in 2014. Over the last year we saw many new trends including significant growth in emerging markets, a dramatic shift in game spending on mobile and the global expansion of social messaging platforms. In this App Annie Annual Index, we will uncover a variety of trends and insights to guide you in making smart business decisions.

Specifically, this App Annie Index 2013 Retrospective report recaps the top headline trends of 2013 with insights to the top-growing countries, categories, app stores, and more. The report shows the causes of this growth, giving you insights into the trends and markets you can’t ignore for the upcoming year.

Mobile flexes its revenue-generating muscle for games, outperforming handhelds on both iOS App Store and Google Play for most of 2013.

Some key insights from this 2013 Retrospective report include:

US, South Korea, and Japan are leaders in app store revenue, however BRIC countries and 5 other regions outpaced these superpowers in download and revenue growth.

Gamers worldwide are increasingly favoring their iPhones and Androids over 3DS’s and Vitas. Both iOS App Store and Google Play experienced a surge in app store game revenue, vaulting them ahead of handhelds in 2013 for the first time ever.

Freemium as a business model continued to be massively successful for a range of app categories in 2013, with games seeing the most money. Developers were able to find creative ways to incentivize in-app purchases by consumers.

Messaging apps transitioned into social messaging platforms, diversifying not only their product offerings, but also their revenue streams. Moving beyond their home countries, they added e-commerce, books and music capabilities.

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Last week Princeton researchers released a widely covered study saying Facebook would lose 80% of its users by 2015-2017. But now Facebook’s data scientists have turned the study’s silly “correlation equals causation” methodology of tracking Google search volume against it to show Princeton would lose all of its students by 2021.

First, it makes a strained epidemiological analogy comparing Facebook to a “disease” that users eventually “recover” from. Facebook may be a massive drain on our attention that some people get sick of, but that doesn’t mean it actually operates like a virus. The researchers then use Myspace as an example of how users recover from a social network and abandon it as if it happened naturally. They make no mention of how Myspace was in fact killed by Facebook.

But the critical error in the non-peer-reviewed study is stating that since the volume of searches for “Facebook” began declining in 2012, it must mean there’s an ongoing decline in Facebook usage.

Yeah, no. Back in Facebook’s web heyday around 2007, many people did surf to the social network by searching for “Facebook” or “Facebook login.” But then this thing called mobile came along and people started getting to Facebook by opening an app, not searching for a website. So searches for “Facebook” declining doesn’t prove much considering over half of Facebook’s traffic now comes from mobile. Since 2012 Facebook has kept growing to its current 1.19 billion users, and it has never had an overall decline in user count.

This isn’t to say Facebook doesn’t have some big, big problems on the horizon. It’s certainlynot “cool” anymore, whether or not it cares. It’s admitted a slight drop in usage amongst young teens in the U.S. It’s seeing increasing competition from mobile-first social apps likeSnapchat and WhatsApp. It will eventually need to weather the medium shift to wearables. Many of its early superstars have left. Hackers are shaking faith in sharing private information. And mobile phones, where you own your social graph in the form of your friends’ phone numbers, make it easier for people to switch to another social network.

Any combination of these could prevent Facebook from growing and cause it to eventually shrink. It’s quite likely that smartphone-carrying Westerners may divide their attention among more apps not owned by Facebook over the next few years. But completely losing 952 million monthly users by 2017 would require cataclysmic disaster.

And even if that happens, it’s as likely to be because fewer people search for “Facebook” or that it resembles a “disease” as the Earth running out of air by 2060 — which is exactly what Facebook’s tongue-in-cheek data scientists prove will happen using Princeton’s methodology. As one of our readers tweeted, “maybe Princeton should worry less about who’s googling Facebook and more about who’s googling Coursera“

Read the full Note below (published with permission) from Facebook’s Mike Develin, Lada Adamic, and Sean Taylor. It’s chock full of lols.

Like many of you, we were intrigued by a recent article by Princeton researchers predicting the imminent demise of Facebook. Of particular interest was the innovative use of Google search data to predict engagement trends, instead of studying the actual engagement trends. Using the same robust methodology featured in the paper, we attempted to find out more about this “Princeton University” – and you won’t believe what we found!

In keeping with the scientific principle “correlation equals causation,” our research unequivocally demonstrated that Princeton may be in danger of disappearing entirely. Looking at page likes on Facebook, we find the following alarming trend:

Now, Facebook isn’t the only repository of human knowledge out there. A search of Google Scholar revealing a plethora of scholarly articles of great scholarliness turned up the following results, showing the percentage of articles matching the query “Princeton” by year:

The trend is similarly alarming: since 2009, the percentage of “Princeton” papers in journals has dropped dramatically.

Of course, Princeton University is primarily an institution of higher learning – so as long as it has students, it’ll be fine. Unfortunately, in investigating this, we found a strong correlation between the undergraduate enrollment of an institution and its Google Trends index:

Sadly, this spells bad news for this Princeton entity, whose Google Trends search scores have been declining for the last several years:

This trend suggests that Princeton will have only half its current enrollment by 2018, and by 2021 it will have no students at all, agreeing with the previous graph of scholarly scholarliness. Based on our robust scientific analysis, future generations will only be able to imagine this now-rubble institution that once walked this earth.

While we are concerned for Princeton University, we are even more concerned about the fate of the planet — Google Trends for “air” have also been declining steadily, and our projections show that by the year 2060 there will be no air left:

As previous researchers [J. Sparks, 2008] have expressed in the past, this will have grievous consequences for the fate of all humanity, not just our academic colleagues in New Jersey.

P.S. We don’t really think Princeton or the world’s air supply is going anywhere soon. We love Princeton (and air). As data scientists, we wanted to give a fun reminder that not all research is created equal – and some methods of analysis lead to pretty crazy conclusions.

When Facebook made an API available that enabled us to analyze when Facebook Fans were online, EdgeRankChecker quickly implemented a new feature called Audience Online (click on the link to see all the feature of the incredible PRO version).

The Audience Online heat map provides a quick, visual way to see when your fans are logging into Facebook. This information can be used to publish posts or identify behavioral trends over time.

The animated Audience Online heat map allows you to see how your traffic patterns change week to week. This allows you to understand how your audience’s behavior may be changing to spot a trend before it becomes the norm.

We’re excited to provide additional value to our free users. If you have any questions on how to use this new feature (which is now live and available in your Page Overview for Free Accounts) Tweet us or leave a comment below.

How To Use

The graph is colored from Red to Green. The green areas represent the times that fans were online above their average rate. The red areas represent times that your fans were online below their average rate. Typically, we see more people online (green) during traditional daylight hours. The change between green to red tends to be more severe when a Page has a very local audience.

The dots displayed on the heat map represent when your Page posted. You can hover over the dot to see more details regarding the post. The size of the dot also indicates how much engagement the post received—dots that are larger had more engagement than the smaller dots.

We recommend looking at your heat map for particular periods of time, as well as looking at how they’re changing. Keep your eye on how the green and red areas are shifting over time.

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Mobile and native advertising are gaining increased popularity. With more social media users checking their accounts via mobile devices than on their computers, in-stream mobile ads are quickly becoming advertisers’ chosen method for getting their message front and center. This infographic provides an in-depth look at the rise of mobile and native advertising and offers predictions for the future.

Native advertising’s influence on a broad range of media, including mobile and social advertising, will allow marketers and agencies to justify and continue to invest in native budgets for the foreseeable future.

However, Facebook is seeing increasing social logins through retail sites and media sites. Overall, 45 percent of social logins throughout the Web in Q4 happened via Facebook, but Google+ isn’t far behind at 35 percent.

Facebook did a little better in Q4, Janrain notices. The social network actually gained 0.2 percent of the market share of social logins from Q3 to Q4, but Google+ is still a hot riser, as partnerships with popular sites such as SoundCloud are doing for Google+ what Spotify did for Facebook.

They had experienced a few consecutive quarters of moderately declining share in terms of preference for consumers, and really reversed that trend in Q4. We saw them maintain their 45 percent share on aggregate across all different types of websites. Clearly, they’re still the most popular choice for consumers at 45 percent. They’ve got about a 10 percent lead on Google, which is the second-most popular choice. Overall, I think it was a positive story for Facebook.

Facebook did see quarterly increases in a few key verticals, namely retail. That’s major for Facebook as it shows that more consumers were willing to connect to retail sites via Facebook during the holiday shopping season. More people also connected through Facebook to media sites, entertainment and gaming sites, as well as consumer brand sites in Q4.

One area where Facebook is trending downward is music sites. Olson told Inside Facebook that there’s just more competition out there. Previously, Facebook was the overwhelming social login choice through sites and apps such as Spotify, Pandora and Songza. Now, Google+ is making up some ground and eating away at Facebook’s market share, namely with SoundCloud, which has integrated better sharing and login techniques with Google’s network, Olson said:

Facebook has traditionally dominated on music sites. That’s been their highest-performing segment, or one of them. I think that the decrease during Q4 is really just a function of increased competition. Google+ recently completed a sharing integration with SoundCloud, which is similar to Facebook’s integrations with Spotify and Pandora. What that’s done is it’s made consumers associate listening to music online more with sharing via the Google+ platform. That’s the correlation with the increased preference for Google. Google, to their credit, has done a great job consolidating all of their services, with GMail, Google Plus, YouTube and Google Play all under a single Google account. … YouTube happens to be a very popular service for music discovery and listening to live concerts or recorded concerts. That means consumers are more likely to associate music discovery and those types of websites with the Google identity.

What a wild year it’s been. You could say that 2013 was the year of social media and you’d be correct. What was once a novelty for people bored and surfing on the ‘net has risen to be an industry in and of itself that companies large and small have embraced around the world as a powerful cornerstone of their marketing initiatives.In case you got lost in the details of 2013, we’ve laid out all the notable moments of the year, month by month, in this handy infographic.What was the most notable social media moment in your life in 2013? Let us know in the comments.